Saturday, June 9, 2012

Our little garden is doing great! Our tomato plants are loaded down with fruit, as are our jalapeños. Our cayennes have some peppers on the and several more blooms. We've already harvested some of each type of pepper. The only thing not doing great is our thyme, and I'm hoping that perks up soon.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Our rosemary which was doing so badly in my previous post did, in fact, bite the dust. I have no idea what went wrong, but it was easily fixed. We stopped into Wal-Mart yesterday and picked up a nice big replacement. I potted it when we got home. While I was at it, I transplanted our basil out of the raised bed into another pot. Some friends gave us some garlic from their bed they were moving Wednesday, and I wanted the spot where the basil was to plant that.

I've never grown garlic before. I remember my mother keeping it when I was growing up, primarily for her homemade pickles. Unfortunately, I never had much of an interest in growing things or cooking while I lived at home, though, so I didn't get any tips there. I suppose I should've done some research, but I decided instead to just jump right in and plant it. It was in one large clump when we got it, so I'm sure I couldn't have put it too close together. I spaced it out 5-6" apart and planted the bulbs with 1-2" of soil over the top. Maybe that was deep enough. We shall see!

Something else I planted yesterday was a Grape Tami G Hybrid Tomato that we picked up at Wal-Mart while we were replacing our rosemary. I had run out of room in our raised bed, so I repurposed one of our many Tidy Cats buckets for the job. I put a few holes in the bottom of it to allow for drainage, so hopefully that will do OK. We haven't had much success with tomatoes in containers so far, but it was the best I could do without digging a hole in the yard.

The thyme from last year that turned green again this spring is still doing well! It's not as full as I'd like, but I'm hoping it will continue to fill out. I trimmed off some of the more sparse branches in the hopes of helping the others do better. Actually, I accidentally trimmed off one of the branches full of leaves in the process. I stuck it in a glass of water in the kitchen window, though, and it rooted. So I'll be planting that this evening, along with a "volunteer" tomato of some sort that has popped up in the raised bed next to one of our pepper plants.

So here's our happy little garden for this year, thus far. Hopefully it will continue to do well!

Friday, April 20, 2012

Monday, April 9, 2012

Yesterday, I checked on our little garden to find that our tomatoes had been dined upon by some sort of bug. Our pepper plants & basil were untouched, but our tomato plants had little holes all over the leaves. As much as I hated to do it, I broke out the Sevin dust. Maybe that will take care of the problems and our plants will continue to do well. They have already grown a lot since I planted them!

Monday, April 2, 2012

Friday night, Brandon and I went to Home Depot and took advantage of their Black Friday sale. They had all of their Bonnie Plants on sale for 50% off. For $14.66, we got 3 Celebrity Hybrid tomatoes, 2 cayenne peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers, 1 mammoth jalapeno pepper, 1 rosemary, and 1 basil plant. Not bad, if you ask me!

Yesterday when I finally got a break from my weekend, I got out and planted everything except the rosemary, which I plan to put in a large pot later this week. Last year I crowded our space too much, so this year I was more careful to pay attention to the spacing listed on the instructions for each plant and follow that. Hopefully everything will do well and we'll have fresh peppers, tomatoes, and herbs before too long!

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Well, I was pretty lousy at keeping this thing updated as to what did well and what didn't on into the summer! In a nutshell, the celebrity hybrids & peppers that were planted in the bed, as well as a couple of "volunteer" basil plants that came up in the raised bed were the only things that survived. Oh, and the thyme...that did well in its pot for quite a while, and in fact has "resurrected" itself this year, even though we were sure it had died over the winter!

Yesterday, I got out and cleared the raised bed of weeds and the remnants of dead tomato & pepper plants. Hopefully this weekend we will get to plant some new stuff.